Follies Of Optimism, Continued

Still, the sour complaints and dire prognoses of 1992–oh, my God, the budget deficit will do us in!–were quickly overtaken by events. ~Bill Kristol

Yes, including such “events” as the 1994 election of a Congress that began to impose some of the fiscal restraint that ideally comes from divided government.  Deficit doomsayers may have been overwrought in 1992, but it was the Perot campaign pushing the deficit to the middle of the debate and the public’s support for balanced budgets that began to head off any potential woes of running deficits year after year.  Relative fiscal restraint combined with the post-’91 recession recovery led to the fat years of the last decade.  It didn’t just come out of nowhere, but was the result of a number of people drawing attention to a problem and attempting, however fitfully and half-heartedly at times, to address it.  Optimists are great ones for minimising the problems that can actually be solved while undertaking impossible projects to reorder entire societies, which is why they are doubly useless when it comes to running a polity.  

Kristol continues:

What’s more, the fear of many conservatives that we might be at the mercy of unstoppable forces of social disintegration turned out to be wrong.

Well, according to the Iraq standard of social disintegration, I suppose they turned out to be wrong.  In other respects, most of the things that troubled social conservatives in 1992 are still around and have become in some cases worse than they were.  Where there was greater concern about cultural rot and crime in the early ’90s–because these seemed to be and actually were the more salient problems of the time–fears of eroding national identity and security, both physical and economic, contribute to very real anxieties.  Some social problems have become less severe in the last fifteen years, but they nonetheless remain great.  Of course, Kristol is an unusually bad one to assess whether or not these claims were vindicated, since he did not accept many of them back then, either, and he is instinctively inclined to find pessimistic views unpersuasive.